Why do I offer divination, despite priding myself on emphasising evidence over woo?
TL;DR: I use it as a focal point for self-reflection, not a tool to predict the future.
I am by no means an expert on the whole history or philosophy of divination, but here’s my personal take:
The criticism of sceptics that I’ve encountered, including the psychologists who have set up experiments to test claims of clairvoyance, are absolutely valid.
The main criticism I’ve encountered is that the messaging of most divination systems is so generic that almost everyone can relate to, or find meaning in, any message presented to them. Therefore, as an objective prediction of future events, they’re unreliable. This is true…
… and it is also true that, even coming from a faith perspective on the topic, a healthy understanding of the practical limitations of divination systems will lead to the understanding that their primary use is not prediction of the future, but clarity around the present.
My personal experience with divination
I was, I think, 12 years old when I was at a sleepover at a friend’s house and we found her mom’s Tarot de Marseille deck and tried our hands at it. This was the first tarot deck I’d ever encountered.
When my friend’s mom discovered us with the cards, we were, quite rightly, chastised for getting into them without permission. Then she kindly indulged our curiosity and showed us how she used them before leaving us with a warning not to touch them again.
Of the 4 of us, I believe I’m the only one who ended up developing a life-long interest after that. Before we were caught that night, I’d tried to work out a reading (partly because I was in French immersion so had the highest probability of being able to read the French-language cards). I cannot for the life of me remember any of the specifics of the reading, but I remember that it was accurate.
I soon procured my own deck to practice with and regularly found that I was able to provide pretty accurate guidance with them. Before I was even in high school, I’d even had a different friend’s mother ask for a reading and was later told that the events she’d asked about transpired the way I’d laid out with the aid of the cards.
As a sceptic myself, I have often remained closeted about this interest, using it largely for myself and for those who happened to find out that I am a reader. In almost 30 years, no one has ever told me that my readings have missed the mark.
I have on occasion, however, shaken other sceptics by the things my readings have uncovered that I had no way of knowing about.
This was enough proof to keep me practicing privately, but my results were not enough explanation for my curious mind. I needed to know how it worked.
You’re reading the person, not the cards
At 23 years old, I was living in Texas and was invited to fill a spot for a tarot reader at a psychic fair. I declined, because I was concerned about not being able to remember the specific meaning of each of the cards without checking in a book.
A friend and mentor who was a self-described medium said to me, “you and I both know you’re reading the person, not the cards.”
It didn’t persuade me to take the spot at the fair, but it is a statement that has stuck with me, and I have revisited and pondered it many times over the years. It rings true for me and most of the other readers I have met over the years who I really respected.
Humans are meaning-makers, and we will look for the parts of the message we can personally relate to and adapt them to our own situation. A reading of the exact same messages to two different people, will be received differently by each of them, according to their own experience and meaning-making. You can use the same cards to weave a very different story for each of them that will be just as true for one as it is for the other.
The cards ultimately provide a starting point for a conversation between reader and querent.* (*Querent = person asking the question) This conversation will ultimately be what illuminates the current state of the querent’s concerns, more than the cards themselves.
If you can describe the current situation accurately enough, predicting what the logical outcomes are, based on the current trajectory, is natural. If they want that outcome, advise them to stay the course. If they don’t, advise them to change their approach. This is logic, not magic.
Why divination seems like it is predicting the future
Ironically, if you actually follow the advice of the reading, you’re likely to end up proving the predictive component wrong. Unless your situation is pretty much entirely out of your own control, most of the advice that can be gleaned from a reading will change the outcome.
If you follow it.
Most of us are really bad at taking advice, so the logical outcome that can be predicted based on the current trajectory rarely changes, and those predictable outcomes transpiring feels like magic or fortune-telling.
Besides, if you’re looking for advice on the future, do you really want to know what will happen in the future? Or do you want to know what you need to do in the present to ensure that the future you want happens? For most people I do readings for, it’s the latter. And most of them already know what they need to do, they just want reassurance to back up their own intuition.
And that includes me, by the way. That’s why it’s such a regular part of my own practice. I don’t do it to get information I don’t already know, I do it to find out what meaning I subconsciously make of the cards so I can understand my own thoughts and feelings better.
This is why I call it self-reflection readings in my service offerings.
When you’re not aware of that instinctive meaning-making habit, as the person whose cards are being read, you’re going to incredulously blurt out specifics when something I say hits home. I end up working that information back into the reading, tailoring the intrinsic meanings to your specific situation, reinforcing the impression that I’m clairvoyant, or at least that the cards are.
I’m quite transparent that this is what I’m doing, if anyone wants to know. But most people don’t want to know.
There’s still room for the woo
This is my base framework of how I understand how and why divination works, but even in my own experience, there is still room for the unexplained.
Since it’s near Samhain/Halloween and I’m in the mood to be spooky, I’m going to share one insight into how the cards have worked for me that has raised the hair on my neck. (And I don’t spook easily.)
If you see tarot represented on TV or in movies, there’s frequently a dramatic scene involving a card called “Death” foretelling disaster. This irritates me to no end, because all that card means is change. It’s meaning is metaphorical. (Though I suppose there’s a social commentary in there about regarding all change as disaster…)
There is one card in the entire 78-card tarot deck that actually means literal death (though it is only one of the possible meanings of that card). I’ve heard anecdotal stories from others about the accuracy of this card to predict deaths, but I don’t think I’ve ever given a reading to someone who subsequently died.
It did, however, come up in one reading I did for a sceptic friend in a certain position that revealed their benign, but inoperable, brain tumour to me. This was probably more jarring to me, the reader, than it was for the friend, but it certainly spooked us both.
More recently, and less macabre, I lost my brand-new Harris Tweed bag in a cab in Glasgow. I was unable to track down the driver and it wasn’t turned in to Police Scotland during the weekend I had lost it.
There is a card in my favourite deck for personal use that indicates, based on its orientation in a reading, whether or not you will find a lost item. I had done a reading shortly after I lost my bag, and the card conspicuously didn’t come up at all. I did a reading a week later, and it came up saying I would find what I had lost. The next day, I received the letter from Police Scotland telling me that the bag had been turned in and I could come collect it at the station.
These kinds of uncanny experiences, especially with the cards that have very precise meanings, are enough to keep the magic of divination practices alive for me, regardless of how pragmatic my approach is overall. But I’ll let you make up your own mind.
If you’d like to experience one of my readings for yourself, you can book into my calendar for a reading here.